Families Enslaved by a life of casual brutality

Suzanne Goldenberg, in the Guardian,18 March, 1996

Suzanne Goldenberg in Matli, Sind province, reports on the
rehabilitation of Pakistanis freed from bonded labor

Like his grandfather and father before him, Rupo Koli was
born a slave, and all his days were the same: long, hard
hours in sugar cane fields, with a...rope hissing through
the air towards his shoulders when he faltered under the
burning sun.

Life was bearable until four years ago when Rupo, his wife
and eight children were sold for 50,000 rupees (1,000 BPS)
to Ali Baksh Leghari of Batin district, a landlord whose
cruelty still makes them shiver with fear.

They wore leg-irons in the field and were made to squat at
wooden posts before they were chained for the night. They
were beaten when the landlord was drunk or had guests to
entertain, and were paid only in flour, in such miserly
qualities that for several days every month they ate grass.

"If we...took an onion from the field, the landlord used to
beat us," Rupo said. Otherwise, they survived by gulping
down a paste of uncooked flour and water and the occasional
chilli; the landlord wouldn't spare the cooking fuel.

Forty-eight hours after human rights activists and police
led Rupo out of bondage, the bazaar in this...town remains a
source of wonder for him. Rupo has walked into town three
times this afternoon...

Neither Rupo, ...about 40, nor his father can remember the
original debt that reduced the family from free men to
bonded laborers, but after years of back-breaking and unpaid
labor on sugar cane plantations it had unaccountably grown
to 118,000 rupees (2,360 BPS).

Although his story is horrifying, Rupo recounts it as if it
were completely normal - and in this part of Pakistan it is.
...in the southern province of Sind, feudal landlords rule
as they have always done: with casual brutality.

Bonded labor was outlawed only in 1992. Shakeel Ahmed
Pathan, the Sind representative of the Human Rights
Commission of Pakistan, argues...officials are reluctant to
enforce the law, partly because they are themselves from
landed families, and partly for fear of offending the most
powerful people in the land.

Many of Pakistan's leading politicians are landlords,
including the prime minister, Benazir Bhutto, and demands
for argicultural reform in the past have met with fierce
resistance.

For the haris living on vast banana or sugar estates, the
landlords are akin to God: quick to anger, slow to forgive,
and unanswerable to no one. They rule unencumbered by such
modern niceties as land reform, taxation, trade unions or
rights legislation.

"All landlords think...haris are their property," Mr. Pathan
said.

So much so...landlord Ibrahim Mangrio did not worry about
witnesses when he grabbed Meran Devi by the hair and dragged
her into a field. "He would rape me in front of my mother,
he would rape me in front of the entire world," Meran said.

Hanif, the...eight-year-old burrowed into her side,
is...living proof of her shame. She said his father's only
concern for his future was that Hanif bear a Muslim name.

The original debts often forgotten, unscrupulous landlords
take advantage of the haris' illiteracy to ensure they can
never be free. ... The haris spend their lives on the
estates in conditions the Human Rights Commission describes
as private jails.

There was no question of escape, said Meran's mother, Jhema
Devi. The estate was patrolled by armed guards. "We died
there; we were born and married there. We didn't leave his
land for 22 years."

...with the intervention of human rights activists who
bombard officials with complaints about bonded labor or
sometimes raid estates to liberate haris, about 1,000
peasants have been freed.

For their pains, Mr. Pathan said, the activists have been
beaten and threatened with reprisals; several landlords have
turned up at his office in Hyderabad demanding...he pay for
the haris he has taken away. Despite an encampment of freed
haris a mile from the Matli police station, the local police
chief denies all knowledge of bonded labor in his district.

The rude shelters...where Rupo and Jhema Devi live with 400
to 500 other recently freed haris are the local equivalent
of the "underground railway" in the southern US states
before the civil war.

The haris remain desperately poor. Most have only one set of
clothes and afew battered kitchen utensils. But they are
beginning to find work as paid farm laborers, taking home 80
rupees a day. As the fear of being recaptured by their
landlords lessens, the haris chart their own physical
transformation. They stand straighter...

"Now I am becoming less...black," Jhema Devi said. She had
never been able to wash properly before.

The haris have a temporary protector in the local church,
but the Irish priest in Matli...describes their freedom as
tenuous. The haris are too unused to independence to know
how to avoid falling into debt. Some of them have become
trapped again.